I saw an interview with a super wealthy guy a while back and while he was definitely a shitlord he had one good point that charity should be done anonymously because it's the only way to know you're not doing it for the recognition

yeah but charity doesn't mean actually giving away your money to philanthropic organizations anymore, it means putting the money into your private foundation, where you can claim it will eventually be distributed to good causes but face few requirements to do so, all while enjoying tax advantages. any publicized giving and the recognition generated is only so the public doesn't wise up and make it illegal for you to do this

yeah but charity doesn't mean actually giving away your money to philanthropic organizations anymore, it means putting the money into your private foundation, where you can claim it will eventually be distributed to good causes but face few requirements to do so, all while enjoying tax advantages. any publicized giving and the recognition generated is only so the public doesn't wise up and make it illegal for you to do this

If you're really operating at a high level, you then put your buddy on the board of your foundation and he puts you on the board of his and you donate to each other and disburse your own money where you like while being insulated from accusations of impropriety

If you're really operating at a high level, you then put your buddy on the board of your foundation and he puts you on the board of his and you donate to each other and disburse your own money where you like while being insulated from accusations of impropriety

dont forget the part where you pay each other big salaries for sitting in each others boards (and doing 4 hours of work/year)

goddamn. that college tuition reimbursement thing in particular seems very good for a fast food dealio.

yeah. i mean the college tuition reimbursement had to be "related to your job" which was easy to do because if it was related to any of your core basic studies like math, english, etc. it was easy to justify because well math = money, english = customer service, and so forth.

mike illitch was the heart and soul of detroit for a long time. he would randomly give his luxury suite boxes at comerica park (where the detroit tigers play, which he also owned) to a store and let the employees do whatever they wanted, when he wasn't using it. it was always a nice little thing.

some of the members of his family i've met were lovely, like his brother, who would come into random stores and demand free poo poo, then try to fire people when he didn't get his way, which he didn't have the power to do.

we would get faxes sent to the store telling us not to listen to X and Y illitch and to call the main office when they showed up.

also a cool story: at the top of the fox theatre (venue, but also the base of operations for little caesars/olympia entertainment), mike illitch had a "pizza" made out of diamonds, emeralds and rubies. it was pretty wild stuff.

quote:

Business Insider spoke with 12 Tesla owners over the past two months, many of whom described a variety of problems with their vehicles that required attention in the weeks and months after delivery.

Some said Tesla's service centers were slow and unresponsive and inattentive to cosmetic and mechanical problems.

quote:

Customers have reported problems before, during, and after receiving their vehicles, including delayed deliveries, broken door handles, and internal computer systems crashing and leaving their cars inoperable. Accounts of early, persistent problems — some that become apparent within days of delivery — contrast with the high customer satisfaction scores Tesla's vehicles have received from independent surveys.

Business Insider spoke with 12 Tesla owners over the past two months who have purchased the Model 3 and Model S sedans. Nearly all of them said they loved their vehicles when they worked properly, but many described a variety of problems that required attention in the weeks and months after delivery.

quote:

The customers Business Insider spoke with who had a positive impression of Tesla's customer service were more likely to have had experiences with the company's mobile repair units, which can fix minor issues at customers' homes or workplaces.

Those who had a negative impression interacted more often with Tesla's service centers, which the company uses for deliveries and more extensive repairs.

quote:

Dennis Phillips, who works as the director of technology for a public school district in Massachusetts, received his Model 3 in May. Two days after delivery, he noticed a problem: What looked like the head of a nail was sticking out on the roof. He called Tesla and spoke with an "arrogant" employee who insisted the company would have noticed that kind of blemish before the car was delivered. Phillips, who said he spotted a razor blade on the backseat of his Model 3 before he took it home, insisted otherwise.

"This is not something I could possibly have done," he said.

Phillips said he took the car into the Dedham service center for a repair he was told would take two to three days. More than a week later, the car was ready. Since then, Phillips has noticed more issues, including blemishes, brakes sticking when he drives in reverse, and the touchscreen failing to turn on for the first part of a ride.

"At what point is your brand-new car not a brand-new car anymore?" he said.

quote:

Communicating with Tesla employees has brought mixed results, Phillips said. While most of the service employees he's interacted with have been pleasant and professional, Phillips said an employee who has scheduled his service visits has used an exasperated tone when speaking with him, as if Phillips were bothering him. That led Phillips to start communicating with the company by email, but he said employees could be unresponsive to his messages and evasive about the nature of the work being done to his car.

At the time of our interview, in early July, Phillips' Model 3 had been in service for a week. He didn't know what was being done to it.

"I don't know how they can not know what it is that they're doing when they've had the car for a week," he said.

quote:

Sultan Meghji, an entrepreneur and technology consultant who lives in St. Louis, ordered his Model S in May and was told it would arrive on June 23. He didn't receive the vehicle until August 2. During his first attempt to pick it up at the St. Louis service center, he waited for 15 minutes before being told the vehicle had not arrived. Later, Meghji would learn that the service center did not have the trade-in and financing information he had submitted on Tesla's website, further delaying delivery.

After picking up his Model S, he drove for less than a block before he realized the vehicle was improperly aligned.

"I drive off the lot and my alignment is so far out of whack that I can barely drive," he said. "I straighten the wheel and I almost run into a bush on the right side of the road."

He returned the vehicle to the service center but was told he would have to keep it for four days until his repair appointment. Meghji said he wished the service center had taken his vehicle and given him a loaner.

quote:

Adam Whiting, who works in the employee benefits industry and lives in Arizona, sent his Model 3 to a Tesla-approved, independent body shop after it was involved in a collision. (Tesla has begun testing company-run body shops for light repairs in select markets, but most customers have to use independent body shops.) The car went into service on June 11, and Whiting was told it would be ready by late July. Later, the body shop informed him that it wouldn't receive all of the parts needed for the repair from Tesla until September.

quote:

For now, Tesla benefits from an unusual amount of patience since many of its customers are wealthy enough to own multiple vehicles or passionate enough to look past imperfections.

"I keep expecting people to be so frustrated with a lot of the bugs and the problems that sometimes these vehicles have, but, for the most part ... people are happy about their cars and they have pride in this company and they want it to succeed," Montoya said.

quote:

Saul Friedman, a television executive who lives in California, said he wasn't bothered by the fact that his Model 3 stopped working the day after he brought it home. He said dealing with glitches is the price of early adoption.

"Was I angry that it happened? No. I have the 33,000th car that's rolled off when they're rushing them out and trying to meet demand," he said. "It's otherwise a fantastic car and there's a lot of software and they're constantly updating it so it's completely understandable."

wasnt there a story about somebody's dad being a literal rocket scientist that engaged with spacex for some diagnostics or testing, asked for a certain batch of data, and the spacex engineers said that wasn't possible until the morning, because the python scripts that managed the oxygen tanks or something hadn't run for the night and they couldnt force it because it was on a hardcoded crontab

model s and x use openvpn to talk to their backend. inside that backend there are metadata services that feed info to the system, one of those things being a ~20MB+ (generated by the worst erp system) json payload that describes supercharger poo poo for the map in the touchscreen. somebody was smart enough to do automated linting but forgot to validate against the custom parser the car runs which caused a segfault in the qt app that runs the ui, which in turn for a variety of reasons forces a reboot of that component. I think we clocked about 15 seconds before it read the file and faulted after boot. it was doing that for an hour before everyone panicked and got me and qa on the phone to fix it. i wrote a quick python/fabric script that ssh’d to as many cars as possible at a time to rm the file